Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2014; its description of Emberton as the founder of Silktide, now good at programming, writing and business, is as of 2014.
Three simple words can change your life: Create, Big and Defy. These are the words that helped Oliver Emberton succeed.
They are simple words, and even simpler to apply, according to Emberton. So if you feel lost or don’t know how to go about something, follow this advice.
1. Create
Creating lets you do whatever you want. Want to be a writer? Then write. Want to be a programmer? Then program. Want to be an entrepreneur? Start your own company.
Emberton admits he never had any training in any of these things, and it didn’t bother him: as he created, he learned what he needed to keep going. Today he is really good at programming, at writing and at running a business. He is the founder of Silktide.
If you create things well, you don’t need a CV, because what you create is your calling card. Creating is also a way of improving yourself. When you write, make art or build a company, it all adds up, and over time everything you have learned through creating eventually comes together. Think of creating as an investment in yourself.
Emberton says he believes most people make a mistake by trading their time for money, otherwise known as “getting a job”. They fall into one of life’s traps, where we sell our time to earn money. While we are doing that, we are not creating value for ourselves, and later on we lose control of our destiny. So your mission is to create. Anything at all, but start creating.
2. Big
If you have a big goal, you almost always win. That doesn’t mean things will turn out the way you planned. But you will win, and your gains will be greater than your losses.
Let’s say your goal is to write a single Facebook status (“hi, looks cloudy today!!”). Anyone can manage that. Now let’s say your goal is to write an entire novel. You probably won’t finish it, or it may end up taking you five times longer than you planned.
But just sitting down to write the novel has pushed you out of your comfort zone and brought out some skills. You may even have become more creative by using a part of your brain that wasn’t getting much exercise.
Even if you never finish it and stop at 150 pages, you will have written far more than most people write in their entire lives. If you keep doing this in everything you set out to do, at some point you will get a win. And when it comes to business, as Warren Buffett himself put it, “one day running a business gives you more experience as a businessperson than all the books you could read put together”.
Of course, it always helps to be clear that to succeed, you must never give up.
3. Defy
If you are one of those people who think the world is fair and logical, you will be frustrated and unhappy all your life. The world actually makes a lot of sense, just not in the way you might think.
Working hard is not enough. Being smart is not enough either, and wanting things to happen is not enough. Your instincts and your upbringing may tell you otherwise, but they will be wrong.
You will know you have to do something, you will be clear about how to do it, you will want to do it, and you will end up doing it. Yet you will still run into failure and not know why, because you did the right thing.
When most people can’t find an explanation for this kind of failure, they tend to blame everyone else (the economic crisis, my useless boss…).
Blaming others only leads to denial, pain and ignorance. So what you have to do, and all you need to do, is look inside yourself and think about what you could have done differently to get a different result.
It is almost always our own fault. But if, after analysing it, we conclude (and are completely sure) that the problem was nothing we could have avoided, then let it go and move on without beating yourself up.
Create, Big and Defy: three things almost nobody applies to the letter, and so a strong reason to apply them and go out in search of success.
Further reading
- Resilience: keys to success when things get tough
- How to change your life radically
- How a string of failures can lead you to success: connecting the dots
Featured image: mpclemens, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
